Another, Vol. 1 (14 page)

“You probably don’t have to worry much at this point.”

The aging lead physician gave his diagnosis in his usual breezy tone.

“From what I saw today, your condition has stabilized. You aren’t feeling any pain anymore, are you?”

“No.”

“Then there’s no problem with you going to school as normal.”

Even his crisp delivery of this news couldn’t wipe away my anxiety completely.

Still feeling fundamentally depressed, I took several deep breaths in front of the physician. Yeah, definitely no more ominous sensations in there. A slight difficulty breathing from the pain in my chest…a week earlier, the symptom had begun presenting again from time to time, but even that had vanished in the last two or three days.

“So then my gym class…?”

“Strenuous exercise is still out of the question. Let’s see how things are in a month. It may take longer.”

“Okay.”

“Just to be sure, I want you to come in again this weekend. If there don’t seem to be any changes, we’ll meet again in a month.”

I nodded, then lifted my eyes to the calendar that hung on the wall of the exam room. Yesterday had been the first day of June. This weekend—that would be Saturday the 6th.

When I witnessed Yukari Sakuragi’s horrific accident on the second day of midterms—that had been exactly a week ago—the pain in my chest had arisen from the problem in my lungs. Just as the anxiety that flashed through my mind had warned me. I’d gone to the municipal hospital the next day to have it looked at, and received the unhappy diagnosis of “signs of a minor pneumothoracic event.” However, they had also told me “It hasn’t reached the stage of a second recurrence.”

“Although there’s a very tiny hole and a minor collapse, it appears that the surrounding tissue has healed. Thanks to that, you managed to stay in decent shape and avoid a deflation of the lung,” the physician had explained. “You probably won’t need any special treatment. Just get some rest at home.”

And so, per the physician’s orders—

Since I’d been shut up in my house all week, I hadn’t been to school. So I had almost no idea what was happening in the class after the accident.

The barest of information that I’d gotten was that Sakuragi’s mother, who’d been in a car accident, had died the same day. That the funeral for mother and daughter had been conducted quietly, for close relatives only. That, of course, everyone in class couldn’t hide the intense shock they felt. That was about it.

I didn’t know what Mei Misaki had been doing since then. I wasn’t utterly without means to find out, of course, but I didn’t want to use
those means
on her or on the other issues. For some reason I felt an overriding hesitation and I lost my nerve.

I still didn’t have a class list, so the only student I could call directly and feel out was Teshigawara, whose cell phone number I had. And him, I’d tried to call a couple times during the previous week, but he never once answered. Maybe he knew it was me calling and he wasn’t picking up on purpose.

My grandmother had heard about the accident, but all she had done was effusively repeat “How frightening” or “I feel so bad for them.” It seemed her concern lay completely with the health of her grandson. Whether or not my grandfather understood what was going on, he
bobbled
his head to every word my grandmother said. Reiko was incredibly concerned about my mental state, but she still wouldn’t get into the subjects we’d touched on. I couldn’t bring it up, either. The mynah bird Ray shrieked as energetically as ever. There wasn’t so much as a peep from my dad in India and I hadn’t told him any of the news yet, either.

In the midst of it all, there was, in fact, one person I could talk to relatively casually. Funnily enough, that was Ms. Mizuno from the municipal hospital. It was two days after Sakuragi’s death that she called me, the day after I’d gone to the hospital, in the afternoon.

“Are you all right? How are your lungs?”

She cut right to the point.

“After all, you did see a horrible accident up close. That’s going to have an effect on you, physically.”

“You know about that?”

“I heard from my little brother. You know, my youngest brother who’s in the same class as you at North Middle? Takeru Mizuno. He’s on the basketball team.”

So that really was him.

“You came to the hospital instead of going to school yesterday, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing bad enough to hospitalize you, I guess?”

“Thankfully, no. I managed to pull myself through it, they said.”

“When are you coming back? To the hospital, I mean.”

“Next week, Tuesday morning.”

“Okay, you want to get together after that?”

“Huh?”

Why…? Before I could say anything more, Ms. Mizuno went on. “Something’s been bothering me. All kinds of things. I don’t know what’s connected to what, or how, and what’s not connected at all. Plus there’s still that thing we need to talk about.”

That thing—about why I’d been asking all those questions about the girl who’d died at the hospital at the end of April?

“So now you’re convalescing at home?”

“I’m trying.”

“Don’t start brooding. If you do have to be hospitalized again, I’ll put everything I’ve got into taking care of you.”

“Uh…okay. Thank you.”

That’s what I told her, but I wanted to avoid that happening at any cost.

“Well, I’ll see you at the hospital on Tuesday, then. I’ll call you before that, though.”

Ms. Mizuno was being very considerate of my frame of mind, because she didn’t once start talking about our common interest. She hadn’t even called me “Horror Boy” like she always did, and deep down I was relieved.

I’d just witnessed real-life blood and gore two days earlier and, unsurprisingly, my emotions had suffered for it.

The nauseating red that had spread across the umbrella that day, the way Yukari Sakuragi had looked with the metal spike stabbed through her throat, the profuse amounts of fresh blood that had pumped out of her. It was all burned into my eyes and wouldn’t go away. The sound of the umbrella snapping and her body rolling onto its side, Mr. Miyamoto’s voice shouting, the siren on the ambulance, the screams and soft weeping of the students…All of it still lingered in my ears, raw.

As much as I tried to tell myself they were two separate things, I was taking a break from horror novels and horror movies for a little while—just then, in my state of mind, I genuinely couldn’t take it.

Rain was falling again, just like the week before. Apparently the rainy season had truly begun, much earlier than most years. As usual, my grandmother had offered to take me to the hospital in the car, but I had firmly refused and come to the hospital alone.

I had promised to meet Ms. Mizuno as soon as my checkup was over. She’d said that she had to work the night shift and she’d go straight from that to the dorm at the hospital to nap. We’d arranged that I would call her when I was done.

Standing near the front entrance to the outpatient area, I called Ms. Mizuno’s cell phone, then spent the time while I waited gazing at the rain-soaked scenery outside.

It was then that I thought about how the rain in Yomiyama was clammier than in Tokyo.

Considering the pollutants in the air, the opposite was probably true. So it was just an issue with my perceptions.

Maybe the word “clammy” isn’t exactly right. Maybe I should say something more neutral, like “it had a richer quality.”

The walkways to the building, the ebb and flow of people, the plants in the foreground and the mountains in the distance…The rain drenching all of these things seemed to take on intrinsically different shades and elements for each. I certainly don’t mean that it was dirty.

My eyes came to rest on the puddles that had collected on the ground.

These were the same. How can I put it? They seemed to have more colors, and deeper colors, than the puddles in Tokyo. Perhaps the problem wasn’t the rain itself, but the difference in the objects seen through it. Or maybe it really was nothing more than a mirror for the images in my mind.

“Sorry to keep you waiting.”

I heard a voice beside me. This was the first time I’d seen Ms. Mizuno without her white nurse’s uniform. She wore a light blue shirt and a black denim jacket.

“How was your checkup?”

“It looks like I won’t have to burden you, at least.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I can go to school tomorrow, too.”

“Oh yeah? That’s great,” she said with a sunny smile. She pulled her cell phone from a pocket of her denim jacket and glanced down at it. “It’s a little early, but do you want to get lunch somewhere?”

“You were on the night shift, right?” I offered her the most basic level of courtesy. “I mean, you must be wiped out…”

“Oh, I’m fine! I’m off tomorrow, and I’m still plenty young. How do you feel about that restaurant over there?”

“Up to you.”

Ms. Mizuno had driven over. She had a cute blue compact car, a huge contrast to the rugged black car my grandmother drove around.

The restaurant chain was the same one we had in Tokyo, but the table we sat at was much roomier than the ones there. After we’d ordered, Ms. Mizuno put both hands to her mouth and yawned hugely. “Fwa-a-a-h!”

“You’re not getting enough sleep, huh?”

“Hm? Well, that’s par for the course.”

“I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have…”

“What are you talking about? I’m the one who said we should meet up. Don’t worry about it.”

Her coffee and sandwich finally came. Ms. Mizuno first dumped a bunch of sugar into the coffee, then took several sips before biting into her egg sandwich, at which point she murmured, “Let’s get started then,” and turned back to me.

“First off, I had a chat with my little brother Takeru Mizuno, who I usually barely talk to. I wanted to ask him a couple things. The class you two are in seems to have some
special circumstances
.”

“Special circumstances?”

“Yup. He wouldn’t give me any details, although I didn’t really know what I should be asking either, which is kind of a problem, but anyway: definitely special circumstances. You must know what.”

“The
circumstances behind the special circumstances
, you mean?” I dropped my eyes and shook my head slowly. “I don’t really know much, either. I’m pretty certain that something’s going on, but I just transferred here and I guess no one’s going to tell me about it yet.”

“The girl who died at your school last week, her name was Sakuragi, right? She was your class representative for the girls?”

“…Yeah.”

“I heard about what happened. And about how you apparently witnessed it. She fell on the stairs and some horrible twist of luck made her umbrella impale her in the throat?”

“…Yes, that’s what happened.”

“It looked like he was scared of something.”

“Your brother?”

If he’d been shocked by the freak death of a classmate, that was only natural. But “scared”? What did that mean?

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not like I asked him outright. But somehow it looked like he didn’t think the accident last week was just an ‘accident.’”

“Not an accident?”

I scrunched my forehead.

If it wasn’t an accident, then was it suicide? Or maybe murder? That was impossible. Neither of those things could possibly be true.

It wasn’t suicide, it wasn’t murder, and it wasn’t “just an accident.” So what could it possibly…?

“What was he afraid of?”

“Who knows.” Ms. Mizuno cocked her head uneasily. “Nothing specific.”

Hey, Sakakibara, d’you believe in ghosts or curses or whatever? Is that your thing?

I suddenly recalled the questions Teshigawara had asked me. Was that the first day I’d transferred in?

So-called supernatural phenomena in general?

That had been the same conversation, a question from Kazami.

Of course I didn’t believe in “ghosts or curses or whatever” or in “supernatural phenomena in general” and I didn’t want to start believing in them now. Sure, the “Seven Mysteries of North Yomi” were all kinds of strange, but they were harmless ghost stories you just expected to find somewhere like a school. In the end, even that story about “Misaki from twenty-six years ago” had to be…

But then…

What if the death of Yukari Sakuragi last week really wasn’t “just an accident”?

I dredged the memories back up.

That day, Sakuragi had come flying out of the classroom when she heard the news about her mother’s car accident. She’d taken her umbrella out of the umbrella stand and, her legs tangling under her, she had first tried to come toward the East Stair, which was closest to where she stood. But then—yes, she had stopped. Maybe because she’d seen us standing by the window at the top of the stairs. The next moment, she had turned on her heel and run off in the opposite direction—to the West Stair.

What if…
I wondered.

What if she had gone down the East Stair, following her initial impulse?

Then maybe that accident wouldn’t have happened.

She’d bolted down the long hallway and run down the West Stair with all that momentum. And to top it off, the floor might have been wet right there and she’d slipped…That unbelievable accident had resulted from so many factors piling one on top of another. So…

Why had Sakuragi behaved that way? Why, as soon as she saw us—Mei and me—had she done what she did?

“Have you ever heard the name Mei Misaki?”

Even when the hot dog I’d ordered came, I didn’t feel like picking it up. But I wet my parched mouth and throat with the iced tea I’d also ordered before posing the question to Ms. Mizuno.

“Misaki?”

Naturally, she reacted to the name. She must have recalled the name of the girl who’d died at the hospital in April, whose first name was Misaki.

“Mei…Misaki? Who’s that?”

“She’s a girl in my class—third-year Class 3 at North Yomi. Your brother’s never said anything about her?”

Ms. Mizuno puffed out one of her cheeks slightly. “Remember, we hardly ever talk to each other most days. What about her, though? Did something happen?”